"So, what are we doing today, Amelia?" you can almost hear government press strategists being asked at the start of the day. "Opening a new sports club for kids in Suffolk, minister. Super picture opportunities here. There will be table tennis." "Table tennis? Goodo."

And so it has come to pass over the last 10 years, government ministers, opposition MPs and lots and lots of local councillors have one by one taken their turn being photographed playing ping pong with perplexed children in new or refurbished sports facilities and youth clubs.

It's usually men, removing their suit jackets to show just how serious they are about sport, because playing table tennis, you see, in the universal pre-arranged PR script, equates to being super, super serious about sport.

The rules of the stunt have it that, while their ties flap around their crisply ironed shirts, a theatrically puzzled minister will be outfoxed by a seven-year-old with a weak backhand and everybody then laughs and smiles.

We see the human side of our politicians, then everybody laughs some more, and any rumbling frustrations about sports provision and how would-be sports British champions shall be inspired in the future is quickly forgotten.

A regular ping pongster is the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, famous for describing the game as "whiff whaff" and claiming it is a British invention to the irritation of the champions from China.

In the Olympic planning stages, Johnson would be photographed around a table acting out his serious face, sometimes playing against Lord Coe. In one staged match last May, ping pong tables were wheeled on to an actual tennis court for the two men at a school in Finchley. Wenlock and Mandeville cheered, while others digested just why we struggle to conquer Wimbledon each year.

When Barack Obama came over for a visit last year, David Cameron took him for a game. Tony Blair did his press duties with the bat, as have Iain Duncan Smith, Gordon Brown, John Prescott and recently Jeremy Browne, the Lib Dem minister in foreign affairs. They've all done it, all gushing smiles as they show how hilariously funny it is to play the game in cufflinks.

The other day it was elevated further with Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, on the front of the papers showcasing this grand sport.

Given this high-profile support for the game by our most powerful heads and the endless pushing of table tennis as the best way to make computer-game kids be more energetic, you'd guess that Britain was right up there, challenging the world's best for medals at the London Olympics. They did, didn't they? Only they didn't. Out of 12 table tennis medals, six went to China, including all of the golds. In fact, China nearly always wins it. Since 1988 when table tennis was elevated to an Olympic sport, it's won 20 of the 24 gold medals.

Although it would be wrong to pretend that table tennis is better funded than football or cricket or tennis, public money is allocated to it. There is delight on the Sport England website about all the places it can be played. Around £1.2m from its match-funding scheme was spent in co-operation with the Premier League and Youth Sport Trust partly on promoting it. The website says another £250,000 of National Lottery funding was spent on getting people playing in village halls and after-school clubs "for the Olympics". Sport Scotland has also invested, hoping to generate players capable of storming … the Commonwealth Games.

Nobody wants to be mean about all the hard work of the organisations that run table tennis in the United Kingdom. People get joy from it, sure. But does it really work as an emblem for getting kids active in this country and expanding sports provision?

It may be easy for good PR pictures to have a sport where pictures of both players can fit into one close-cropped photo, but Johnson and Coe should have pushed back the ping pong tables at that Finchley school and played proper tennis. That's a sport people camp out overnight to see at Wimbledon.

It's easy for authorities to say they have created sports provision by conjuring up a table tennis table – they don't take up much room and you don't have to landscape a new hockey pitch or dig out a new pool. But we should be seeing Boris Johnson trying the 100m dash in his photo shoots. We'd all love a British champion to beat Usain Bolt.

We should see Cameron trying diving, not just popping into the aquatics centre see how Tom Daley and his mate are getting on at a timely moment. Get Nick Clegg boxing. In cruel terms, there is no desperate national desire to win gold at table tennis. We want to win at the big ones and we want our kids to be running around a field.